Your points are valid, but assume that social media should be provided as a free service with no strings attached. Want world class connectivity, uptime and networking for $0. Try doing this on a small scale on your own servers. - Social networks need to pay for infrastructure and their founders hope to make a profit. To expect them to provide a service which is free, transparent and open is naive and utopian.Of course, there ARE free social networks, such as many blog sites etc like the wordpress example you give.The downside is all your friends and family are somewhere else.There is no doubt that some networks (eg FB) have abused their trust and market share, and will pay the consequences, but some sort of paid model is going to deliver a better service for most users, yet no one wants to pay up front, so backend profits such as data mining are the most successful business model at present.

Appreciate your thoughts on social networking and privacy. So rare to hear anyone care to consider the deeper issues. Making such, not so obvious, yet egregious, privacy violations should not become standard as you point out in your article here, but has all to quickly become the case. Cloud computing will never secure ones data, not even with new 'secure' standards being proposed. Do you know what nation your clouds data center is physically located in? Are the privacy laws the same as in your home country? Will your data be misused when the company is acquired or sold? End users of cloud services don't know, and would not know, to consider such things! I shudder when I hear about school districts and government agencies utilizing cloud services such as Google Apps. Its about money for them, not your rights to privacy or whatever else concerns you.

Technology and privacy currently is much, much worse than we will ever know. We should be extremely concerned about technology and privacy issues.

I turned off my FB a couple years ago when I found out they never delete user data and all too frequent of changes to the FB TOS and\or AUP privacy\usage policies were very annoying. Back in 2001 I set up my own web and terminal server on my home network so I could access my data remotely, shortly after, my ISP began blocking it. Such censorship was not illegal until merely a few years ago or so, but the damage is done, I never set up the services I needed after they blocked me. I was forced into cloud services such as hotmail, google, etc. My ISPs were always happy to sell me sub-standard hosting services however.

The sad reality is all these services could easily be run on ones own system(s) within their own domicile, but that would take the money and control out of it for the cloud service providers and others involved. Your smartphone could download playlists and videos off your own home based cloud, as well as get email, or that file you need. Unfortunately, corporations and others want the most important and expensive component, even more information about you.

Yes, thought I would comment on an article once on MSNBC. Put in my credentials and got a prompt that indicated it would be automatically published to an additional 8 chat/blogs/services without an option to opt out of any of them. At least they had the good sense to include the cancel button or infamous X in the upper right corner.

This is highly insightful comment.I think of social networking as an expanded form of business communication, not to be confused with personal interaction or personal communication. At the same time I take a jaundiced view to how some companies are grabbing data from it and treating it as a basis for marketing. They know nothing and soon display that. The best social networking has a personal element in it and is revealing of the author. But it's a wise author who saves the truly personal for a more personal setting..Charlie Babcock, InformationWeek

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.